Shake-up at the Top of Marcellus Driller Mountaineer Keystone
A little over a year ago, Mountaineer Keystone, a pure play Marcellus/Utica driller headquartered in Pittsburgh, bought out PDC Mountaineer for half a billion dollars, creating a company with 181,000 net acres totally focused on the northeast (see Major New Player in the Marcellus Emerges: Mountaineer Keystone). Mountaineer Keystone got its start in 2010 when founder/CEO Rob Kozel formed the initial management team from former Texas Keystone people. In 2011 the company took a boatload of money from First Reserve, an energy investment firm. We don't have the back story, but on Tuesday Mountaineer announced that Kozel is out as CEO and in his place the board has selected David Wood, the current Chairman of the Board at Mountaineer Keystone. Kozel will remain on the board in a "non-executive role." As we said, we don't know what happened, but it sure smacks to us of a palace coup--that Kozel was forced out of running the company he founded (we've seen it happen before, it ain't pretty)...
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